Academic dissertation to be presented with the assent of the Doctoral Training Committee of Human Sciences of the University of Oulu for public defence in Kaljusensali (KTK112), Linnanmaa, on 16 December 2016, at 12 noon

Abstract

This research project explores how notions of Canadian exceptionalism are being challenged and/or reproduced in responses of students of seven Canadian universities to a survey related to internationalization of higher education. The study analyses data from surveys (n=1451) completed by undergraduate students in different disciplines collected between 2013 and 2015. This data is part of a larger database of surveys that was developed within the Ethical Internationalization in Higher Education (EIHE) research project (2012–2016).

This research adopts a mixed-methods approach to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. A post-representational approach to the methodology of social cartography is used to map two facets of the data. These facets are the general discursive field in which various exceptionalist tendencies are being contested and/or reproduced, and the multiple dimensions of articulations of exceptionalist tendencies.

Canadian exceptionalism is in this research understood as a complex set of self-constitutive discursive practices, policies, self-perceptions and assumptions that simultaneously affirm and construct an imaginary of Canadian society and Canadian nationals as morally, ethically and culturally superior by exalting both the nationals’ and the nation-state’s inherent character as already good global citizens. Exceptionalism is used as an umbrella term that joins together several problematic aspects of unexamined ennobled narratives about the nation and national subjects. In this research the concept of exceptionalism is developed by drawing on multiple critiques of different aspects of liberal subjectivities.

The findings suggest that exceptionalist tendencies and articulations can be observed in the responses of both international and Canadian students. They also suggest that while critical thinking and engagement with diversity are valued highly by almost all students, the responses in the survey exhibit a high level of ambivalence in terms of how (and to what extent) critical thinking is deployed, while diversity is often constructed in commodified ways that seem to indicate a desire for consumption of the Other’s difference for personal and/or national benefit.